A Poker Post

Well, sort of anyway. No pot odds or how to play whatever from wherever. I want to talk about culture. It started on Bill Rini’s site. Bill, of course, is more like a shift manager. Being a simple brush isn’t an apt description. The recent discussion is about the problem and tribulations of raking money from pots. That is an obvious problem when your numbers are in decline. So, the scramble.

Having played at Kim’s old home, I understood community. A lot of friends were successful grinders. At the time that translated mostly to 2-4 or 3-6. Yet every day many would meet in the lobby at around 4 p.m. so the Brits and Yanks could get a S&G going to harass the loser for the next 24.

That type of culture was similar to the blogger world I then inhabited. There were regular schedules of private tournaments that were very well attended by people not really looking hard at the ROI. It was better players than most would ever see in a MTT at that level.

The reason people play is not exclusive. I would guess not a few muti-accounters did it to avoid the light and have some fun without comments.

We used to do silly things that made little monetary sense. I remember getting $10 free for not being on a site for a while along with some others I knew. We had a contest to see who could get the most in a month. Try and explain how several serious grinders got caught up in it.

With the info that sites can mine, there are a lot of promotions that make little sense beyond the class of people that it makes sense too. And, sites haven’t figure that out and maintain their shotgun approach.

Hate to steal from another site — even when it is my words. But it will bring you up to speed on my view.

What has really happened was Black Friday. Not as we see it but as a site might. The management at other sites drooled. All of a sudden, the top two U.S. facing juggernauts were out of the picture. The idea for the survivors was to make hay while the cloud sun did its thing.

Well, that didn’t just happen and fall into their hands. Old problems didn’t go away. Exponential growth affected few. Problems for other seemed to get worse. Yup, Bodog was sucking hind tit again.

Let me go back. Kim managed to do more than other manager with bathrobes — honest, I am not making this up — than others could with a five-figure budget. I am not saying they were perfect. Their support operation was beyond lousy in an arena where lousy abounds. But, he did manage to get inside the heads of a lot of players and coax them his way with limited resources expended.

An analog to the S&G’s I described above were little MTT’s called blogger tournaments. There were a host of them at various levels that never made sense to those outside the loop. Let me digress. When that Friday hit, I’d been killing a stupid little Stud8 tournament for months. Luck did not explain away my killing it. I’d found a +EV way to succeed. Well, blogger tournament and those S&Gs mentioned, aren’t +EV. You have a better/worse shark:fish ratio in them. Yet, in their heyday they were considered a must by many. People doing things for ulterior motives isn’t anything new.

In the heyday, every site promoted the WSOP. PokerStars figured that didn’t fill folks Jones for tournaments. They weren’t alone but they built on it while other looked at bottom lines and, instead, pulled back. People are still willing to promote some WSOP seats. None promote the PokerStars circuit that has given them legs. Why? Well that is “the competition” doncha know. They keep that going even knowing that the WSOP (Harrah) will shortly be all the competition they can handle and more. Promoting the Euro/Asian/SA circuits might make sense if they bothered to look at their customers. If a guy wants one of those circuits, why not make it possible instead of sending him to P* to play?

It is simple things like that which are beyond ignored. Tomorrow we will do what we did today. Nevermind we are doing it with less in customers, rake and whatever. It is good enough and what others do. In doing so they ignore more data than even Amazon garners. But, Amazon mines the data better. Amazon figures out what works; Bodog comes up with anonymous tables. Wow! WTG, Bodog.

ADDENDUM:

Here is a PokerRoom bathrobe example:

There was a guy in the forum promoting 3-9. I think his name was Sikillu or such and the hand he called “The Sik”. Bloggers will easily identify with 2-7 silliness that has abounded — THE HAMMER. Anyway, Kim set up a promo. The site tracked hand that played 3-9 and won. Progress was posted. In the end,. somebody won a PokerRoom bathrobe. It generated playing crap hands in ring games. It added rake. It got more people playing. It cost a $20 bathrobe.